A new case of remission in a little girl born with HIV and who received antiretroviral treatment soon after birth was presented at the International AIDS Conference

A new case of remission in a young girl born HIV positive has been identified. / Mauro Pimentel/AFP

What are the results of this early treatment?

A little South African girl born HIV-positive has been living a healthy life without medication for almost nine years now after receiving treatment for the first few months of her life, a study published on Monday reveals. This is only the third such case involving a child.

Cases of remission without lifelong treatment may be rare and still unexplained, but they represent a strong source of hope for children born with the virus.

Doctors began treating the little girl with antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, which prevent the development of the virus, from the age of two months. After 10 months, the treatment was stopped as part of the study. By this time the presence of the virus in the blood could no longer be detected.

Eight years and nine months later, the child has still not developed full-blown AIDS. The fact that this remission has lasted for so long leads one to believe that it could be lasting, according to Avy Violari of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, one of the study's co-authors.

The child has not been cured since the HI-virus is still present in her body. However, it has been so weakened that it cannot multiply or be transmitted to someone else, even without treatment. Normally children born with the virus must undergo treatment for life to achieve such a state.

What is the interest of such therapy?

There have already been two other cases of remission in children. One was a French child treated from the age of three months to six years and now aged 20 years, according to a study published in 2015.

The other was an American nicknamed the "Mississippi Baby" who was treated until the age of 18 months. However, in her case, the virus reappeared after two years.

This type of remission, called "functional remission" is one of the main lines of research in the fight against AIDS. Eradicating the virus from the body of a patient is still impossible today.

Biologists have come up against the capacity of HIV to hide among certain lymphocytes, "viral reservoirs", that become active once again if the treatment is stopped.

Anti-retroviral drugs, in use since the 1990s, have revolutionized the lives of people living with HIV. However, they require strict observance and have side effects such as diarrhea and nausea.

Moreover, treating millions of patients for life presents a financial challenge, hence the interest in working on remission without lifelong treatment by administering medication for a limited period at an early stage of infection.

"We're trying to understand why certain patients manage to control HIV infection and what to do for everyone to achieve that," explained Asier Saez-Cirion, a biologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

"We want to find the factors, particularly the genetic ones, that foster this control in order to induce this type of mechanism to cure AIDS or come up with a vaccine," he added.

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